A multi-disciplinary course taught by Anne Dalke and Laura Blankenship

A new topic for me

2009 February 8

by Mista Jay

This week’s reading reminded me of a story my English teacher in 7th grade told us about. It was about a boy that went to my middle school a couple years before my class did and since kindergarden he would always wear dresses to school, every single day. I remember the kids in my class (me included) went wide-eyed, and some of us laughed, but my teacher continued, and explained to us that when he finally met the child in 7th grade, he was shocked to realize that no one in the class minded that this boy wore dresses because they had all grown up with him. They thought it was perfectly fine. In fact when one girl from the class explained to him that this is what the boy wore, she also included that she wore dresses as well, implying that there was no big deal.

I remembered that after hearing the story, my 12 year old self was thinking “But who wants to wear a DRESS? Boys don’t even HAVE to wear one, and they STILL want to?” And I think apart of me agreed (and apart of me possibily even now still agrees) with cultural feminists who sugested that transsexual behavior “buys into society’s gender norms” because not ALL women wear make up and skirts. Maybe it’s because I was such a tomboy when I was younger, “femininity” didn’t seem like such a big whoop, and I remember thinking just last semester, when reading for sociology that transexuals DID seem to bring out the core sterotypes of their desired gender.

However, I think the other part of me likes that gender identity is so fluid, that it doesn’t have have to be attatched with our sex at all. Cultural femminists criticize male-to-female transexuals as “buying into society’s gender norms instead of rebelling against them,” but i think that society believes “normal” is either the X or the Y that we are born with with and I think transexuals ARE indeed rebelling by saying that they feel different, that they SHOULD have been born differently and that they WILL take control over their won bodies in obtaining the change they want in order to feel comofrtable in their own skin. I belive that is extreamly powerful.